Note: I thought I would give readers of this blog a chance to look at the introduction to my book Masters of the Humdrum Mystery (assuming you never bought or borrowed the book). It's 7925 words, counting the footnotes, so its a lot of free content! Hope you enjoy.--TPT
Reviewing John
Curran's Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks (2009), an exhaustive
structural analysis of the Queen of Crime's copious surviving working notes,
Agatha Christie biographer Laura Thompson complained that the effect of
Curran's book was “to make Christie seem like not much more than the sum of her
plots....a mere devisor of puzzles.” In
an earlier article that touched in part on the Secret Notebooks,
Thompson asserted that to treat Christie simply as an ingenious puzzle maker
was, in her view, essentially an act of denigration. “Her critics have called Christie
a purveyor of mere puzzles, of 'animated algebra',” wrote Thompson. “Yet if she were only that, it is impossible
her books could have endured as they have.
[Christie] had an intrinsic wisdom—a grasp of human nature—that informed
the geometry of her plots and made them profoundly, morally satisfying.” This idea expressed by Laura Thompson, that
writing puzzles--mere puzzles--is an inherently less worthy endeavor for
a detective novelist than revealing to one's readers one's morally satisfying
intrinsic wisdom, hardly is held by Thompson alone. Indeed, Thompson's opinion is the dominant
critical view of crime fiction today, and has been so for decades. Thompson's 2007 biography of Christie
constituted a bid by the author to persuade critics and book reviewers to take
the Queen of Crime more seriously, not as a purveyor of puzzles (though these
puzzles are commonly seen as the greatest such devised in the history of the
genre), but as a mainstream author with sober things to say about the human condition. Thompson's effort to place Christie in the
pantheon of noteworthy, serious writers deserving of respectful critical
treatment met with little success in the eyes of the mass media, however,
reviewers of her biography predictably proving resistant to the idea that
Christie could be seen as anything more than a mere puzzler. London Observer columnist Rachel
Cooke, for example, was openly mirthful at the very notion that one could take
Christie seriously as a writer: “Thompson quotes the novels...reverentially, as
if they were Wharton or Eliot, not the result of the hack-work that meant
Christie could write one and sometimes two novels a year for five decades. She repeatedly tells you how brilliant this
or that book is—and what she admires is not Christie's way with riddles, but
the stuff nobody else can find in her books: insight, motivation, deep
emotion.” Expressing similar skepticism
in her review in the London Telegraph, Jessica Mann, herself a mystery
novelist, bluntly deemed Thompson's assertion that Christie's “perfect
geometric puzzles” also are “perfectly distilled meditations upon human nature”
to be “over the top.” Yet another
reviewer, the Times Literary Supplement's Lindsay Duguid, questioned
whether even Christie's clever puzzle plotting could salvage what Duguid found
to be the Queen of Crime's intolerably banal writing. “[R]eading [Christie's detective novels]
brings one hard up against the realities of leaden exchanges and flat,
repetitious description,” Duguid wrote dismissively. “One can hardly bear to read on.” Duguid derisively termed Christie's beloved
tales of detection “anti-novels.”
Despite such
critical scoffing, Agatha Christie readers for nine decades now, delighted by
the ingenuity of those critically derided puzzles, have proven more than able
to bear reading on; and Christie detective novels still are enthusiastically
devoured today, over thirty-five years after the death of the author, while new
Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple films adapted from those novels continue to
appear on television (though sometimes in free adaptations that give Christie
fans more pain than pleasure).
Additionally, a coterie of British detection writers who, like Christie,
first appeared in the span of years known as the Golden Age of detective
fiction (a period, from roughly 1920 to 1940, when a “fair play” puzzle with a
solution potentially deducible by the reader was generally considered an
integral part of a detective novel), remains in print today, most notably
Christie's sister Crime Queens, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio
Marsh. However, another group of impressive Golden
Age detective novelists—a group once eagerly read and celebrated, like Agatha
Christie always has been, for skill in puzzle construction—today is mostly
forgotten by all but book collectors and classical mystery enthusiasts and
specialists: the so-called “Humdrums.”
Though these “Humdrum” detective novelists most often are dismissed by
the modern critics who deign to take even momentary notice of them as hack
purveyors of “mere puzzles,” unworthy of serious attention, these authors
actually merit sound scholarly investigation, on account of their intrinsic
merit as mystery writers as well as for the light they shed on both the mystery
genre itself and English social history in the decades from the 1920s to the
1950s.
The
term “Humdrum”--that damning appellation for a particular band of once
widely-esteemed Golden Age detective novelists--was popularized by an
influential post-Golden Age mystery critic and crime writer, Julian Symons
(1912-1994), whose genre survey, Bloody Murder (1972, reprinted in 1985
and 1993), remains a cornerstone of mystery criticism. Rather than seeing the period between World
War One and World War Two—when considerable emphasis in mystery literature was
laid on crafting fairly clued puzzles for the reader to solve—as a “Golden Age”
from which modern crime writers had declined, Symons viewed the period as an
eccentric detour off the main road of aesthetic development in the mystery
genre, from the Victorian era's “sensation novel” (a serious novel where
shocking and sensational events, encompassing crime and sometimes murder, play
a great role) to the modern age's “crime novel” (a novel about crime, usually
murder, ideally including realistic police procedure, social observation and
psychological penetration). Though he
recognized her limitations as a literary writer, Symons had genuine admiration
for Christie as a detective novelist, deeming her a clever designer of puzzles
who was capable as well of composing sprightly narratives. Yet of the writers he labeled Humdrums,
Symons declared peremptorily that he could “no longer read [their work] with
any pleasure.” Symons asserted that most
of these Humdrum writers “came late to writing fiction” and that few of them
“had much talent for it.” While they
doubtlessly “had some skill in constructing puzzles,” Symons grudgingly
allowed, Humdrums had “nothing more” than that to offer readers--and that alone
was not enough.
Although it was with
Bloody Murder that Julian Symons cemented the notion of a passé
Humdrum school of detective fiction in the minds of modern mystery critics and
readers, he had written in disparaging terms about this group of writers before
Bloody Murder first appeared in 1972.
In a 1959 crime fiction review column in the Sunday Times,
Symons, noting the death of detective novelist Freeman Wills Crofts, crowned
Crofts' countryman and contemporary John Rhode (a pseudonym of Cecil John
Charles Street) as Britain's now reigning “master of the humdrum.” Four years later, in his first general survey
of the mystery genre, “The Detective Story in Britain” (a pamphlet published
for The British Council and the National Book League), Symons did not
specifically use the term “Humdrum” to identify a particular group of, in his
view, dull detection authors, but he clearly had the word or something quite
like it in mind when he wrote of Golden Age mystery novelists who “produced
books which had almost invariably been plotted with a slide rule, but were
written without style or savour.” In
these works, Symons asserted, “plot...was all,” while “wit, characterisation
and consideration of the psychology of the people involved in the books”
counted for “nothing.” In Symons' view,
the determined adherence of these authors to restrictive rules laid down for
the writing of fair play detective fiction in the 1920s trapped them in a
sterile, artistically constricted environment that could yield only lifeless
sub-literature.
Julian Symons made
his disdain for Humdrums clear enough in his critical writings, but he was less
clear about just which writers actually comprised this group. In “The Detective Story in Britain,” Symons
cited as specific examples of the inferior writers he had in mind Freeman Wills
Crofts, spouses G. D. H. and Margaret Cole, E. R. Punshon, J. J. Connington
(pseudonym of Alfred Walter Stewart) and Ronald Knox, adding that these
individuals stood “among a host of writers now almost forgotten.” Ten years later, in Bloody Murder,
Symons recalled as notable Humdrums three of these “now almost forgotten” writers,
John Rhode, R. A. J. Walling and J. S. Fletcher; while he dropped from the list
Punshon and Connington and transferred Knox to another category, “Farceurs.” Crofts and the Coles held their places, the
former being given the dubious distinction of being the best of this dull
lot. In a later edition of Bloody
Murder, Symons added to the list Sir Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher, who
wrote as Henry Wade. Later critics have followed Symons in noting
the existence of a group of Golden Age Humdrum writers, yet the exact
membership roll of this group has remained imprecise to this day.
Most often Freeman
Wills Crofts, John Street, Alfred Walter Stewart, Henry Lancelot
Aubrey-Fletcher and G. D. H. and Margaret Cole are mentioned as humdrum writers,
with Crofts being treated as the leading figure among them. In this study I focus on three writers—railway
engineer and devout low church Anglican Freeman Wills Crofts; army artillerist,
military intelligence officer and electrical engineer Major Cecil John Charles
Street; and Scots-Irish chemistry professor Alfred Walter Stewart—as the
greatest exponents of the true Humdrum school (Aubrey-Fletcher and the Coles,
who are not really properly considered Humdrums at all, I deal with in a
separate study). I aim to demonstrate that this school of mystery fiction has
been unjustly disparaged by Julian Symons and the many critics who have adopted
his views.
What really
distinguishes “Humdrums” as a discrete group of writers? As we have seen, Julian Symons essentially
identified Humdrums as individuals who “came late to writing fiction” and
placed greater emphasis on puzzle construction and adherence to fair play
detection than on characterization and stylish writing. This is fair enough as far as it goes, though
in my view Symons insufficiently values the great technical sophistication of
the plots in the best works of these authors. All three of the foremost Humdrums, Crofts,
Street and Stewart, were men of professional backgrounds who brought
considerable workplace expertise to their writing of detective fiction,
producing some of the finest works in the classical, puzzle-oriented style of
the Golden Age of the British detective novel.
At their peak, they were among the most popular and critically-esteemed
British detective novelists. Indicative
of the one-time standing of Crofts, Street and Stewart is that they--like the
great (and much better studied) Crime Queens Agatha Christie and Dorothy L.
Sayers--were all founding members of the Detection Club, a social body
consisting of the elite of Golden Age British detective novelists.
This trio of writers
has been neglected in genre studies for too long. With the exception of Jacques Barzun's and
Wendell Hertig Taylor's monumental defense of the classical Golden Age puzzle
novel, A Catalogue of Crime (originally published in 1971, a year before
the appearance of Bloody Murder), critical works on the genre in the
last forty years overwhelmingly have aped Symons' approach to the Humdrums,
treating these authors as writers of little account and giving them at best
only sporadic, most often dismissive, mentions in surveys. In my view, this approach is mistaken. Not only are the works of these so-called
Humdrum authors of note for having once been among the most well-received and
widely read detective fiction of the period, but they stand as useful
correctives to genre historians, who too often have reached over-broad
conclusions about the purported “feminization” and conservatism of the British
detective novel in the Golden Age based on interpretations of the books of only
a small number of writers from the era, commonly the Crime Queens Christie,
Sayers, Allingham and Marsh.
In Bloody Murder
Julian Symons admits to having omitted discussion of once highly-regarded work
by “many Golden Age writers” on the ground that he had examined in detail “the
most notable practitioners....and the period can properly be judged by
them.” More recent genre surveys have
offered coverage of Golden Age authors that is even further truncated than that
found in Bloody Murder. For
example, in his Watteau's Shepherds: The Detective Novel in Britain,
1914-1940, Leroy Lad Panek cavalierly dubs the Humdrums an irrelevant
“group of hangers-on” and immediately dismisses them from his consideration. I dissent from the view that the works of so
many writers from this period can be thus cast aside. Just as the modern-day British Crime Queens,
P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, cannot be said to stand for all crime writers of
more recent times, the Golden Age Crime Queens (plus the occasional attendant
male or two) cannot justly be said to have stood for all the British detective
novelists of their day. In point of
fact, the writers who are the subjects of Mere Puzzles differed in
significant ways from the today much better known and studied Crime
Queens.
The most obvious
difference between the Humdrums and the Crime Queens is the simple biological
fact that the Humdrums were men rather than women. As the reputation of the Crime Queens
relative to that of other British detective novelists (a great many of whom
were male) rose after World War Two, critics came increasingly to see classical
British mystery, in contrast with the American “hardboiled” private detective
novel of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, as a feminine demesne. This tendency has accelerated with the
proliferation of feminist studies in academia over the last several
decades. While laudably correcting a
previous tendency by many male critics toward unjustly dismissive attitudes
concerning female-authored mystery fiction, these studies have helped foster an
unfortunate neglect of male British Golden Age detective novelists.
Today many studies
either entirely omit male British mystery authors of the Golden Age or too
hastily dismiss them. For example, when
setting the Golden Age context for British detective fiction in her 2007 popular
biography of Agatha Christie, author Laura Thompson finds it necessary to
mention only Christie's sister Crime Queens, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery
Allingham and Ngaio Marsh, completely ignoring male writers of the period. Thompson even concludes that Christie “was
probably the least feminine of any of the writers of classic detective
fiction”--an assertion that surely would have come as a surprise to John
Street, Freeman Wills Crofts and Alfred Walter Stewart. Similarly, genre scholar Erin A. Smith
asserts that the “best-selling and most critically acclaimed British mystery
authors of the 1920s and '30s were disproportionately women” (just what is
meant by “disproportionately” is not explained). “There were some successful male authors of
classical detective fiction between the wars,” Professor Smith allows; yet she
also asserts that British women mystery novelists “were so prominent” in the
genre “that the occupation of mystery writing could seem as 'feminine' as
teaching or nursing.” Encapsulating the
currently ascendant critical view, Susan Rowland concludes in her 2010 essay, “The
‘Classical’ Model of the Golden Age” (which omits all but one of the Humdrum
authors and misinterprets the remaining one, Freeman Wills Crofts, based on a
reading of merely one of his thirty-three detective novels): “All in all, the
golden age form is a feminized one.”
Admittedly British
mystery writing of the Golden Age, as portrayed by most genre critics and
scholars today, does indeed appear to have been as feminine an occupation as,
say, nursing; but, as any mystery reader should know, appearances can deceive and red herrings abound. From my research I have concluded that certainly
a majority of British writers of Golden Age detective fiction were men; and
among these men were some of the most popular and highly-regarded mystery
writers of the period, including the Humdrum authors. Over the years the traces of these writers
may have become obscured, like rug-covered bloodstains on the parquet flooring
in a country house mystery, yet they remained under concealment, awaiting
dramatic discovery by curious scholar “detectives.”
Besides being male,
the Humdrums also differ from the Crime Queens in their occupational
backgrounds. In their writing they made
use of significantly different real world vocational experiences, particularly
an intense familiarity with science and technology. A survey of the Crime Queens reveals a paucity
of such vocational experiences on their part.
Agatha Christie was the daughter of an American expatriate living on
inherited income. She herself had no
professional background, with the exception of some volunteer dispensing work
during World War One, until she became a successful writer. Dorothy L. Sayers, the daughter of a country
clergyman, attended Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied modern
languages and medieval literature. She
later worked nine years in the advertising business, experience she used in her
detective novel Murder Must Advertise
(1933). Margery Allingham, the daughter
of a newspaper serialist, began writing professionally by the age of
nineteen. Ngaio Marsh, daughter of a
bank clerk, produced Shakespearean plays in addition to writing her series of
detective novels. Conversely, the
Humdrums came to fiction writing from well-established technical/scientific
vocational backgrounds: John Street, an English army artillerist, intelligence
officer and electrical engineer; Freeman Wills Crofts, a North Ireland railway
engineer; and Alfred Walter Stewart, a chemistry professor who taught at
Queen's College, Belfast and the University of Glasgow.
Naturally enough,
the vocational experiences of Humdrum authors influenced their writing, making
it diverse from that of the Crime Queens.
This divergence of professional backgrounds among British Golden Age
writers and its diversifying effect on the genre fiction they produced is a
point typically missed in discussions of Golden Age detective fiction that draw
mostly on the Crime Queens for evidence.
For example, Erin A. Smith claims that “classical English detective
fiction, murders aside, trafficked in remarkably feminine currencies—emotion,
private life, domestic spaces.” Leaving
aside the question of the merit in the view that emotion, private life and
domestic spaces invariably are “remarkably feminine currencies,” it will become
readily apparent to readers of this study that Humdrum works often trafficked
in more stereotypically masculine currencies, such as the very public spaces in
which businessmen and the police performed their professional functions. To note the single most extreme instance
known to me of a Humdrum British Golden Age detective novelist trafficking in
remarkably “masculine” currencies, in Mystery on Southampton Water, a
1934 Freeman Wills Crofts novel concerning industrial espionage and multiple
murder involving feuding cement companies (we are a very long way from country
houses here), the author rather strikingly goes so far as to entirely omit
female characters from his tale.
The error in which
too narrow a focus on the Golden Age Crime Queens can result is apparent as
well in P. D. James' “autobiographical fragment,” Time to Be in Earnest (1999),
in which the modern-day British Crime Queen asserts that Golden Age detective
novelists “had very little knowledge of and even less apparent interest in
forensic medicine.” P. D. James offers
in proof of her assertion the point that “many of the most eminent [Golden Age
writers] were women with no scientific training” and concomitantly little
interest in realistically portraying science in their fiction. These “many” eminent women writers James
cites turn out to be three of the four usual Crime Queen suspects, Dorothy L.
Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh (Agatha Christie qualified as a
dispenser during World War One, gaining wide knowledge about drugs and poisons
which she put to ingenious murderous use in her tales). James' reliance on three women writers as her
evidentiary basis leads again to an overly sweeping generalization about the
Golden Age, for the Humdrum writers she fails to consider in her analysis of
the period tended to be scrupulous in dealing with precisely those points of
technical accuracy she chides Golden Age writers for ignoring.
The
critical focus on the Crime Queens has led to a general consensus that not only
was the Golden Age British detective novel an essentially “feminine” genre, but
that it also was politically and socially conservative as well as classist and
racist, being riddled with disdain and condescension toward the English working
class, foreigners and ethnic and racial minorities. Three of the Crime Queens, Dorothy L. Sayers,
Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh, created aristocratic gentleman sleuths who
often carry out their investigations in milieus deemed outrageously snobbish by
hostile critics of the classical form of the mystery genre. Moreover, while Agatha Christie's most famous
Golden Age detective, Hercule Poirot, was a solidly bourgeois Belgian émigré
(middle class and foreign, no less!), Christie often has been accused of
a snobbish treatment of servants in her work, on account of such notorious
passages as this reflection from the bright young heroine of her 1925 mystery, The Secret of Chimneys: “I certainly knew her face quite well—in that
vague way one does know governesses and companions....It's awful, but I never
really look at them properly. Do you?”
Drawing
largely on the works of the Crime Queens, genre critics typically portray the
world of the British Golden Age detective novel as a unitary one that is, to
quote P. D. James in Talking about Detective Fiction, “middle-class,
hierarchical, rural, peaceable.” On this
matter critics have been heavily influenced by poet and voracious detective fiction
reader W. H. Auden's 1948 essay, “The Guilty Vicarage.” In this essay Auden discusses his preferred
sort of detective story, that in which murder takes place in a placid English
village. Murder disrupts the orderly
life of the village, Auden explains, until the detective arrives “to restore
the state of grace” that, Eden-like, previously existed there. Although Auden in actuality was writing only
about his preferred sort of detective story (“I find it very difficult...to
read one not set in rural England,” he admits), his essay all too often has
been taken as a generalized description of all British detective fiction from
the Golden Age, leading once again to the drawing of misleadingly sweeping
conclusions about the genre in this period.
More
conservative critics, like Auden himself as well as P. D. James, have taken a
benign perspective of this purported portrayal in Golden Age detective novels
of an Edenic, rigidly stratified, pastoral world. Indeed, P. D. James, who was born in 1920,
argues that these works essentially portrayed, without overmuch exaggeration, a
place that actually existed for many individuals during the years when she grew
into adulthood:
[I]t was an England I knew, a
cohesive world, overwhelmingly white and united by a common belief in a
religious and moral code based on the Judeo-Christian inheritance...and
buttressed by social and political institutions which...were accepted as
necessary to the well-being of the state: the monarchy, the Empire, the Church,
the criminal justice system, the City, the ancient universities. It was an ordered society in which virtue was
regarded as normal, crime an aberration, and in which there was small sympathy
for the criminal....[T]he 1930s were years of remarkable freedom from domestic
crime....It was therefore possible to live in a country town or village and
feel almost entirely secure. We can read
an Agatha Christie novel set in what seems a mythical village, in which the
inhabitants are happily reconciled to their allotted rank and station, and we
feel that this is an exaggerated, romaticised or idealised world. It isn't, not altogether.
To
be sure, most critics, likely viewing the genre from a more left perspective
than P. D. James, are far less sympathetic than she concerning the social and
political biases that they perceive in the Golden Age British mystery. “The social order in [British Golden Age]
stories was as fixed and mechanical as that of the Incas,” damningly declares
Julian Symons in Bloody Murder.
Rather grudgingly Symons allows that Golden Age British mystery writers
were not “openly [emphasis added] anti-Semitic or anti-Radical,” yet he
adds that “they were overwhelmingly conservative in feeling.” For his part, Colin Watson, author of Snobbery
with Violence, another seventies-era, politically left history of Golden
Age British mystery and thriller fiction, wrote even more caustically of the
works of the period than Symons, asserting that in their books between-the-wars
genre writers consistently adopted the views of an obtuse English middle class
that saw “working class people as envious, unreasonable and vicious, but too
stupid, fortunately, to constitute a real menace in any political sense.” According to Watson, the placid English
village temporarily disturbed by murder in these tales (memorably dubbed by him
“Mayhem Parva”) was emphatically a false creation, “a sort of museum of
nostalgia” for the social and political structure of a vanished Edwardian
England. A more tempered statement of
this view can be found in two highly influential leftist academic studies of
mystery fiction from the same era, Stephen Knight's Form and Ideology in
Crime Fiction (1980) and Dennis Porter's The Pursuit of Crime:
Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (1981). Both men implicitly treat their narrow and
thinly sourced interpretations of Agatha Christie's detective fiction as
broadly applicable to the Golden Age British mystery genre as a whole. “The world of the [Agatha] Christie novel,”
insists Knight, “is a dream of bourgeois rural living without the heights,
depths or conflicts of real social activity.
It is a projection of the dreams of those anxious middle-class people
who would like a life where change, disorder and work are all equally absent.” Porter likewise stresses the alleged
backward-looking, pastoral conservatism of Christie’s mystery fiction. The Crime Queen’s novels, Porter declares,
“projected the vision of a mythic England of cottage and manor house,
churchyards and country lanes, where only solvable crimes posed a threat to
age-old ways of life.”
However
accurate a view of the Crime Queens this may be (it has been persuasively
challenged by other scholars and in my own opinion is not entirely merited), in
my view Humdrum authors treated various sociocultural issues in a more nuanced and
unpredictable manner than critics and reviewers typically have allowed of
British mystery writers in the Golden Age. In her study of Agatha Christie,
Merja Makinen has astutely pointed out that political conservatism does “not
necessarily rule out a questioning and even subversive attitude” toward
particular generally accepted cultural and political norms. While it is true
that the Humdrums, like the majority of Golden Age British detective novelists,
can be classified to some extent as “conservative,” nevertheless they are not
the High Tory, gentry-worshiping caricatures too often found in genre
surveys. Although John Street came of
genteel origins, he was a political Liberal who despised hidebound social
structures and in his writing sympathetically depicted energetic men of humble
backgrounds rising in both urban and rural business environments through their
hard work. Similarly, Freeman Wills
Crofts through his novels made his unassuming, petit bourgeois policeman,
Inspector French, one of the most famous fictional English detectives of the Golden
Age. Also notably, John Street
vigorously condemned anti-Semitism, while Freeman Wills Crofts, a strong
believer in the Social Gospel, after the onset of the Depression became
extremely critical of big business and private greed. To be sure, the post-World War Two writings
of Street and Crofts, which were produced at a time when an ascendant Labour
government was pushing through ambitious and controversial left-of-center
political reform, are more reactionary in tone than their earlier works; yet
those earlier works are much more varied than critics typically have allowed of
mystery genre fiction in the Golden Age. Even Alfred Walter Stewart, the most
consistently conservative of these authors, is notable for the acerbically cynical
and unsentimental view he takes of much of humanity in his J. J. Connington
tales. English society, as portrayed in
books by the Humdrums, often is far less closed, comfortable, stratified and
stable than one would expect from a reading of most genre critics. In short, greater familiarity with writings
by these neglected authors gives us a significantly better balanced
understanding of the Golden Age of British mystery fiction.
For scholars of
mystery genre history, the treatment of gender issues by the Humdrums also has interest,
despite the fact that the Humdrums were uniformly male. John Street, who in his own personal life
defied social strictures of his day by living with one woman while he was
married to another, created some dynamic and rebellious female characters that
do not conform to gender-bound conventions of the time. Boundaries, whether professional or sexual,
sometimes are transgressed by these daring women. To be sure, Freeman Wills Crofts and Alfred
Walter Stewart offer more traditional treatments of female characters, yet
these treatments are of interest in their own right; and they receive attention
as well.
While an ever-increasing
number of studies of Golden Age detective fiction have appeared since the
trailblazing publications of Jacques Barzun's and Wendell Hertig Taylor's A
Catalogue of Crime and Julian Symons' Bloody Murder nearly forty
years ago, few of these studies have attempted to follow Barzun and Taylor and
integrate the so-called Humdrum detective novelists into their analyses by
taking serious, informed looks at their work.
Rather, they have echoed Symons' dismissal of the efforts of Humdrum
authors as “mere puzzles,” unworthy of serious critical consideration. Yet works by this particular group of writers
once were seen by many critics as supreme examples of the mystery art form, and
they were quite popular with readers.
Moreover, these books remain prized by admirers of Golden Age detective
fiction even today. It must be said,
with respect, that there was more to the Golden Age than the four Queens of
Crime, important as these women clearly are in the history of the genre. “To read the detective novels of these four
women,” notes P. D. James of the Golden Age Crime Queens, “is to learn more
about the England in which they lived than most popular social histories can
provide.” Beyond doubt one can glean valuable
historical detail from the books of the Crime Queens, yet one can do so as well
from the books of other popular Golden Age detective novelists, most certainly
including the Humdrums. Detailed study
of “Humdrum” detective novels and stories is justified because it shines light
on neglected works and because it informs understanding of both the genre as a
whole and of the time and place in which that genre thrived. In the Golden Age's country house of mystery
there in truth were many mansions, some of which, having stood for decades
sadly shuttered and neglected, now receive a long overdue airing.
